With Listelist.com and Onedio.com, a new content format joined our social lives too: the "listicle." List sites have been everywhere in the world for a while now, and, a little late, the trend reached Turkey as well and won huge popularity — so much so that even traditional bloggers started giving list-style content more weight on their own channels.

So why do we love listicles so much?

1- Content May Be King, But Reading Is Hard Work

Reading has always been a bit of a problem, actually. People don't enjoy ploughing through long articles on subjects that aren't directly in their interests. Instead, they gravitate towards content they can glance at and move on from — the soap-bubble kind, interesting for a moment and then forgotten.

2- No Time

Back when there were fewer blogs and news sites were in the hands of only the big players, people could gravitate towards the sites they were more used to. But things are very different now. Bombarded by thousands of blogs and sites, people don't want to spend much time reading content anymore. The reason is simple: "I don't have time!" In this time-poor climate, listicles — offering information and entertainment in bite-sized capsule form — attract more interest.

3- Listicles Save the User from Hunting Down Information Piece by Piece

Looking for a collected roundup of the most famous Instagram influencers, the dates of great battles, or people who narrowly survived car crashes? A listicle acts almost like an encyclopaedia for that kind of bulk search — provided, of course, someone's already made a list on your topic.

4- People Use Web Pages Vertically

Listicles draw more interest than gallery-style posts because most apps built for internet users move up and down. So instead of clicking and waiting for a new page — and a new link — to load, it's much easier, and faster, to scroll up and down within a single page. Even on the recently popular line.do, which lets you build content along a timeline logic and offers both vertical and horizontal options, people find the vertical timeline more appealing. Social network design has a lot to do with that too.

5- Listicles Make Life Easier for Content Providers Too

It's not just for fun, funny posts — listicles have also come to be seen as an easy format for content providers wanting to promote a brand, product or other subject. Rather than writing a long article, copywriters often simply choose a listicle to save the day. (Though this article wasn't written to save the day! :))

Finally, having covered the advantages of listicles, it's worth touching on the pitfalls too. It's very hard for list-style pieces to serve as reference material on a given subject, because content providers, seduced by how easy listicles are, often lift their topics, photos, captions and even entire content from foreign sites, publishing them with barely any effort — sometimes without even changing the order. Avoiding that trap really matters. So let's close with this: "content is king, and originality is a mark of quality."